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California Botanic Garden
@californiabotanicgarden

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It's CalBG Staff Pick time! Today's pick is from Herbarium Workroom Coordinator Rhay Flores and a recent fun find: One of the (many) amazing things about working in an herbarium is bearing witness to the stories that these specimens encapsulate. Every specimen takes us to a unique place and time in a given plant’s life, offering rich insight into the realms of both botany and history. These dried plant specimens can help preserve and communicate the fascinating stories behind some of history’s great scientific strides. The specimen above is a collection of Nelumbo nucifera, commonly referred to as Oga Lotus or Sacred Lotus. The label on this particular specimen indicates that this plant was sown from a seed that was over 1000 years old! The seed was collected about 100 years go by famous paleobotanist, Dr. Ichiro Oga, from an archaeological site within a peat deposit in southeast Manchuria. Dr. Oga, aware that the habitat for Sacred lotus required a body of water, deduced that the seeds were several hundred years old, as the hydrology and rates of erosion within the area indicated that the river at the site had drained at least 400 years prior to the seeds’ discovery. A few decades later in 1946, Dr. Willard Libby, a chemist from the University of Chicago, developed a method of estimating the age of organic material known as “Carbon dating”. His method essentially approximates the age of organic specimens using the rate of decay of Carbon-14 material. Just five years later in 1951, Dr. Libby used this method to determine that Dr. Oga’s Lotus seeds were 1040 +/- 210 years old. The habitat in which this seed initially developed ceased to exist hundreds of years ago, but it still germinated and flowered! Swipe through to see images from the germination experiment! #CalBG Staff Picks is a regular feature highlighting staff members and the plants, specimens, and more that have caught their attention and inspire their work. #CalBG #CaliforniaBotanicGarden #BotanicGarden #BotanicalGarden #PublicGarden #CaliforniaNativePlants #Research #Education #Conservation #Horticulture #Botany #Herbarium #StaffPicks